So, I decided to stop talking about contributing to Debian and start *actually* contributing to Debian. I ran "aptitude search '~i!~M' | head" to find a package to start working on, and the first one that came up was acpi-support, so I looked it up on PTS and got started. Maybe this isn't the right way to start, but I'm more interested in bug squashing and maintenance for packages I use than anything else. The package has a couple of bugs with patches. I reviewed them, built a NMU for each (both with version -9.1), and made sure I didn't introduce any new lintian messages. Since neither of these bugs appear to be rc, I'm assuming an NMU would be inappropriate, but I did it for "practice". If I were to make a similar NMU, would it be best to do a single one that fixes both bugs, as well as other issue(s)? The package isn't lintian clean, so I also started working on that. My lintian (lenny) doesn't report maintainer-script-ignores-errors although it is reported at http://lintian.debian.org/full/bart%40samwel.tk.html . I could also be that I'm working off the VCS that is listed on the PTS instead of extracting the deb-src. I went ahead and fixed out-of-date-standards-version, which is simple enough. The native package issues are something I'm going to want to discuss with the maintainer(s) or debian-devel, since the upstream appears to be Ubuntu and I'd normally consider that downstream from Debian. I think I know how to convert it to be a non-native package, but I'm not sure if that will mess things up. I looked at debian-rules-calls-debhelper-in-odd-order, but the debian/rules in the current version looks fine. I looked through the source of that lintian check and it looks like it's buggy. It doesn't pay attention to any -p option passed to the dh_* utility, so it reports an error when dh_installdeb is invoked for package acpi-support-base after dh_builddeb is invoked for package acpi-support -- not generally an error. It looks like a few of packages might be getting bad errors for the same reason (http://lintian.debian.org/tags/debian-rules-calls-debhelper-in-odd-order.html -- antlr and mtr, e.g.). I think I can fix the issue with the lintian check, but don't have a patch yet. That means time to file a bug, right? In the meantime, should I simply ignore those lintian tags, or go ahead and update acpi-support with overrides or fixes? (I've already got patches for both those approaches.) Bart, I hope you don't mind I CC'd you; since this is basically all about one of your packages, I figured you could be helpful. Once I get something together that needs sponsoring, is mentors.debian.net preferred hosting or would my own VPS be fine? -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss03@volumehost.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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